Yesterday I read an article in the Boston Globe about the use of bicycles for transportation in Holland and the lessons we might learn from the Dutch regarding cycling in Boston. So at the end of the day yesterday, I picked up my Hubway bike from the kiosk near our offices at HubSpot and bean my trip back to Porter Square.

Sidebar note: For the first time in my career, three years ago - I became a commuter -- a real commuter -- taking the commuter rail. But a year ago I discovered the Hubway and it essentially changed my commuting life. For $85/year I have the use of a Hubway bicycle whenever and wherever I want it anyway in the downtown Boston and Cambridge areas. It's great for trips of less than 30 minutes (essentially all of my trips during the work week) and the best part is it just works. The technology is really good, billing is accurate and fair and customer service is awesome. Does it work all the time? - no - I have had some glitches - but the positves far outweigh any snafus.

So far this year during my membership, I have taken 105 trips - I get a complete and accurate report of my start location, end location and time on the bike - great for those who like to track their "exercise".

Here is a sample of my report:

Gives me chance to get an extra 30 minutes of exercise every day.

Anyway back to traffic -- you know things are changing when in addition to watching out for cars on the road you have to pay attention to bikes passing you "on the left" as the chant goes or sometimes on the right? with no warning. 

As I cycled out Cambridge Street and onto Beacon street - it was difficult to find a place to stop at the traffic lights between all of the other bikes. This was the first time I have encountered this much bike traffic in all of my riding days in the US ( and by the way - I started out riding in New York City -- biking over the 59th Street Bridge from Queens to Manhatten before it was legal to do so)

Things are improving here in Boston for folks who enjoy cycling and want to use this as a form of transportaion for their commute. The bike lanes are helpful, Hubway is awesome -- just need cyclists and drivers to have a bit more education so we can share the road.

In the course of my work as a Consultant at HubSpot, I advise scores of companies on Inbound Marketing and AdWords strategies. Many of these companies are making the same kinds of mistakes in their AdWords accounts that are costing them money, time and leads/customers.

Here are some quick and easy fixes you can make to improve your results:

1. Keep Search and Display Network separate – this is an easy trap to fall into as Google makes it almost the default condition to setup your campaign to operate on both the Search and Display Networks (We will discuss the difference between these in our next post). To be sure you don’t combine these you want to select Search network only for all of your campaigns to start (later on you can add in Display – it’s a different medium – with more possibilities for success – but also a lot more possibilities to run into trouble). To be sure that you are doing this and for ease of analysis later on name the campaign appropriately, e.g. Executive Travel – Search or Executive Travel – Display
2. Target the countries and languages that you work in – not the entire world! – So when you are setting up your campaign, in the settings tab – you should be choosing target country United States and target language English (this is not to say that you shouldn’t be advertising in other places and in other languages, just that for most of the businesses that I deal with – they do most or all of their business in the US with English speakers. If you are selling international or to non-English speakers – create a separate campaign target directly at those countries and choose the languages you want to target too.
3. Don’t start out with too many keywords – a few well-targeted keywords will do better for you than hundreds of not-so-well targeted keywords.
4. Make sure your landing page ties in directly with your ad – or another way to put this is – Do NOT use your HomePage as the destination URL for your ads – probably the biggest error that most of my clients make is to send people to their homepage when they click on an ad. Google calculates a Quality Score for each of your keywords and the algorithm for calculating the Quality Score includes several factors:
   1. The Click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword
   2. Landing Page Quality - the Relevance of the Landing page to the Ad - this means you want to make sure that that page that you send people to is directly related to the Ad and the Keyword(Tip: use the Keyword in the headline of the Ad). But it is also OK if the landing page is thematically related to the keyword. The Landing Page Load Time is a factor too
   3. The CTR of the AdGroup’s Display URLs
   4. Account History – here older and more active accounts have a slight advantage of newer accounts
5. Make sure to have two to four ads per ad group – keep your adgroups tightly themed. So each adgroup will typically have a small number of related keywords (it would be good to have one keyword per adgroup – but very impractical). Let Google test each of the ads in the adgroup – it will display them evenly if you choose the setting under Ad Rotation: Rotate evenly: Show ads more evenly for at least 90 days then optimize

That setting will let you see which ad is doing better and let you kill the poor performer and test other ads.

Using these 5 tips should help your performance getting started. If you would like me to review your AdWords account just contact me here

Recently my wife had cataract surgery on both eyes. TYpically this can be done over a 4-6 week period with a 2 week separation between the surgery on one eye and the other. The surgeries went well, the results have been great. One of the most difficult parts of the surgery was keeping track of the eye medications that needed to be taken for each eye. There are three different medications and for each eye over a four week period the number and types of medication vary in both content and number of times that they need to be taken.

To simplify the process - I created two charts -- one for each eye. Posted these in the bathroom and made it very easy to keep track of which meds were taken and how many times they were taken.

You can download the chart for the left eye here and for the right eye here.

To use these charts just fill in the start date for the process -- all of the dates will then be filled in.

Then just print them out and post in your bathroom.

Good luck!

Last night I was at the Leonard Cohen concert at the Wang Center in Boston. Without any reservations, this was one of the best concert experiences I have ever had. The Wang Center is an amazing venue - with its beautiful ornate ceilings and excellent acoustics. 

The concert began promptly with no opening act and ran for three and a half hours. The audience was a mixture of all age groups and the most polite (when appropriate) and raucous (when appropriate) audience I have ever been in. 

Leonard Cohen was energetic, humble and gracious the entire evening (in stark contrast to Bob Dylan as I recently heard him at the Garden with Mark Knopfler). He truly wanted to communicate with the audience - when he said we are going to give you all we've got -- he meant it.

He covered a huge swath of his reportoire - starting with Dance Me to the End of Time, and including such classics as Suzanne, Chelsea Hotel, Everybody Knows

, a spoken moving version of 1000 Kisses Deep, Bird on a Wire, and of course his most recent success Hallelujah.

The band was fantastic - they play with remarkable restraint -- i.e. you know that each one of them can (and does) break out into amazing flashes of virtuosity on their respective instruments. Even the backup singers are multi-instrumentalists and when they had their solo number - it was like being sung to by angels in heaven.

Clearly recent events had shaken Mr. Cohen - he pointedly left out the lyric

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you 

from Hallelujah.

Each band member got a chance to be featured on different songs - and of course Sharon Robinson - longtime collaborator and co-songwriter got to shine on Alexandra Rising.

Even more striking was that Leonard Cohen thanked and introduced EVERY member of his production team - the sound guys, the lighting guys, the guitar technicians everybody -- he broke up those intros doing half at the end of Act 1 and the other half right before the close of the show.

Many standing ovations later we were all in awe of the experience we had just shared as we walked back to the T at Park street - much much later than we had ever expected.

If you can get tickets to this concert - you have a shot at going tonight December 16th -- do it -- you will love the evening!

How Adwords and Inbound Marketing Help Minority-owned Businesses Grow Faster

For the past 7 months, I have been privileged to work with Google in its Accelerate program. This program is collaboration between Google, HubSpot and local supplier development councils. The program offers minority businesses a chance to grow their business using a combination of Adwords and Inbound Marketing.

For almost all of these businesses, this is their first foray into the use of Adwords and it is for sure their introduction to Inbound Marketing. As a senior consulting project manager at HubSpot, I have consulted to and educated hundreds of companies in how to use Inbound marketing. As a serial entrepreneur I have used Adwords for several of my businesses as well as to promote my Art business.

In the program, the curriculum (and the companies have to agree to put in a minimum of 8 hours a week to work on the program) teaches the companies how to grow their business online and teaches them to:

• get started with Adwords

• use HubSpot to leverage their investment in Adwords,

• track their results

• follow up automatically and programmatically to leads

• increase their website traffic and visibility by the creation of re-markable content including:

  • blogs

  • offers

  • calls to action

  • social media

What's so special about Adwords with Inbound

Many people in business have been around long enough to remember buying display advertising. I used to do this quite often myself. I would advertise in Computerworld magazine buying a full page ad in color for $25,000. I would place the ad and get a bill for $25,000. What kind of results did I get? Sometimes the phone would ring - sometimes we would get back one of those advertiser fill in cards and sometimes we would get very little or no response. When we got a dismal response, I would call my ad rep and say the ad is not working what should we do(not the best question to ask my advertising sales rep at the magazine!). Her response was always place the ad again - i.e. spend another $25,000 and see what happens.

At that point, I started thinking it would be really great if I could purchase advertising that I could actually measure and be charged for the advertising based on how many people actually read the ad and followed through.

It took a while for it to happen but Google's great achievement for marketers was inventing and implementing Adwords. Now businesses could launch as many ads as they wanted at NO charge and only pay for the ones that "worked"

How does it work?

To get started, consider a few questions...

• What kind of business do you run?

• Who is your customer? more precisely and to start who is your best kind of customer?

• What is her job title?

• How old is he?

• What kind of business are they in?

If you have identified your customer (and that should be easy - remember you are the expert here) you are on your way. Now imagine that you are that person - i.e. imagine that you are your own imagined best prototypical best customer. You are sitting in front of your computer and you are trying to solve a problem the answer to which will be the product or service that YOUR company offers.

Now for the key question...

What would you type into Google to begin your search???

Taking a specific example, let's say you run a cleaning service in Concord, Massachusetts. You specialize in offices and businesses in the local area.

Let's say you are a cleaning service in Concord Massachusetts -

Your best customer is a property manager who owns small office buildings in the local area.

He's about 45 and is online a a lot...

He enters "office cleaning service concord massachusetts"

Here's what you see

The listings at the top in the yellow are the highest ranking google ads.

The listings down the right side are other google ads

The listings down the left are listings that come up organically - because they place high in their search engine optimization – these are FREE but it takes some work to get there (one of techniques and methods that we teach in conjunction with using the HubSpot tools)

But for now think about what it would be like if your company could appear here or here

If you're like most people I talk to about this you're probably saying “Cool" right now.

And that's right - you could be right up there tomorrow if you place an adwords ad.

So check out those ads that you see... how are the alike?

How are they different?

And more importantly, which one would you click on and why?

If you find one that you like and click on it – that is when the company that placed the ad actually has to pay -- not 25,000 dollars like we mentioned before but more like 25 cents or 50 cents or a dollar depending on the popularity of the phrase that you used to find this company.

Now for the hard part -- after checking out the ads you see and after trying several different phrases and seeing what comes up - now it's time to create your own ad on paper.

Give it a try - write a headline - 25 characters max including spaces.

Then  write two lines of body copy at 35 characters each

Now you have a couple of ads on paper - you've explored the phrases that your potential best customers would use to find you - and you are almost ready to create ads

Coming in for a Landing

When someone clicks on your ad the place that your visitor gets to is a website page that should do your selling for you! In inbound marketing terms, we call this a landing page. A landing page is a website page that ties in to your ad or your call to action, has a compelling marketing message and contains a form - a place for the visitor to give you the information you are looking for (in exchange for giving them whatever it was that drove them to your landing page and that you "closed" the initial part of the sale with the copy on the landing page.

The Hubspot software provides an easy to use method of creating landing pages that sell. And more importantly, the business does not need to hire outside help to create or design these pages -- so your company can have completely targeted landing/selling pages that accomplish exactly what you want them to do -- while giving the visitor something of value in return -- an ebook, a consultation, a tipsheet, a webinar, a free trial or demo.

Using this combined approach of HubSpot with Adwords, we have been able to jumpstart scores of minority-owned business to enhance their web presence, learn and understand who their websites are working for them, and more importantly help them attract new potential and actual customers and develop a marketing plan to grow with their business.

I have been a customer of Mozy for two years now. Recently I got an email that my credit card had expired and they were unable to bill me.

So I went to their site and tried to enter a new credit card. Well, Mozy has officially implemented several Customer Prevention Policies! First in order to enter your credit card info you need to pass the Captcha test. Well I generally dislike Captcha, I dutifully entered the captcha code and failed and continued to fail for about 20 frustrating minutes. 

After a call to customer support - no wait - Mozy does not take customer support calls from Home subscribers -- with a live chat -- after another 15 minutes of frustration - the rep finally informed me that Mozy does not really work with Google Chrome and that the captcha will always fail if you are using Google Chrome. Nice to tell us that now!

So I went into Mozilla and finally was able to enter my cc info and thought I was done --but it turned out that when you re-enter your credit card info you are automatically billed for a multiyear subscription - and are not given the choice to choose a one year subscription that I wanted. But never mind that - the next day I got an email saying that my credit card had not been accepted.

So I went thru the process again and entered a different credit card. And once again thought I was all set. Then today I get a note from my bank - the first cc- saying they had taken $125 from my account for my Mozy two year subscription -- the one that supposedly didn't work.

Now I'm ending up being charged 180$ for my ostensible one-year subscription. So I tried to contact customer support and had the following interaction:

Notice at the end -- I had to prompt her to apologize...

She says thank you -- and nothing else until my suggestion...

Mozy has an incredible problem with awful customer support -- I had to post on Facebook, Twitter and contact them multiple times because of their policy of not really wanting to support their Home customers for any reason. I can understand the no tech support policy -- but for accounting issues, they need to be able to have a phone conversation. For a company in the backup and protection of my digital assets business - This is a disgraceful way to do business.

After my posts on Facebook and twitter regarding Mozy customer service, other highly dissatisfied Mozy customers have been contacting me -- frustrated in their attempts to get support from Mozy -- thinking that I am Mozy customer support!

I had seen the HubWay bike depot

at North Station for months as I got off the commuter rail from Lincoln, MA on my way to HubSpot (no relation) on First Street in Cambridge. It looked interesting - twenty five or so shiny silver bikes neatly sitting in a bikeracklock device. I never thought much about checking it out.

One night in October, one of my classmates at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School showed me the Hubway depot near the law school. As he got on his Hubway and rode away I thought "hey I should give this a try". So the next day I took my bike helmet with me and when I got off the train at North  Station I walked across the path and had my first encounter with the hubway distribution technology.

Through a very simple user interface, Hubway had accepted my credit card. printed a receipt and printed out my take-bike code. I selected an available bike and punched in my take-bike code and the green light flashed and the bike was now mine. Ok - was now mine for 30 minutes. I put on my helmet got on the bike and rode the 8 minutes to Lechmere Station in Cambridge where I docked the bike(very important to do this part correctly - see below) grabbed my messenger bag from the nice carrying device on the bike and walked a half block to my office.

This was the greatest - I thought -- i didn't have to descend downstairs and wait for the GreenLine to get to Lechmere -- and it was at least as quick if not quicker to take the bike. At the end of the day - I just walked a half block to Lechmere station and put my credit card back in the HubWay Kiosk and not without some trepidation that I would be charged again(I wasn't) got a new take-bike code, selected a bike, punched in the code, removed the bike and away I went to North Station to catch the train. Arrived at North Station, docked the bike and caught the 5:40 train to Lincoln.

So how much does this cost? Well for $5.00 you get as many 30 minute usages of the bike as you want -- you will not pay a penny more (they do hold a $100 deposit on your credit card just in case) UNLESS you go over 30 minutes. In that case you are charged a progressively escalating fee - but if you go over by a few minutes, you are charged an extra $1.00 billed to your credit card.

I repeated this routine every day for 3 days at which point I was hooked. I signed up online for the HubWay key for $85.00 which gets me unlimited use of the system for a year -- of course with the 30 minute tranche limitation. But having the key speeds things up dramatically. I walk up to any bike, stick my key in the socket, wait for the light to turn green and take my bike away.

The wait for the light to turn green is especially important on returning a bike -- when you are taking a bike - you can't take the bike until the light turns green it is locked. But when you return a bike you need to make sure that the green light comes on after you put the bike back. If not, you could find a charge on your accountfor $65.00 on a day where I took the bike and rode it 12 minutes from Kendall Square to Lechmere. Apparently I didn't lock it in well or wait for the green light --

Needless to say I was surprised to see a $65 charge on my account. However, I called support at HubWay - by the way they are open 24/7 and answer their phones promptly. When I had the rep look up my account and explained what had happened he told me no problem as a first time situation we will credit your account - but make sure to wait for that green light each time you return a bike. So SUPERB customer service at Hubway!

In the meantime, I am delighted to be using the HubWay system every day - there are convenient stations all over Boston and Cambridge with more coming. I gett my daily dose of exercise and am enjoying biking in traffic with the many bike lanes that Boston and Cambridge has designated. I was especially pleased to see a sign as I was riding near the Museum of Science that said - something like bikes can take the whole lane.

So my commuting life has become a combination of fun, exercise and adventures in driving a bike in the city - highly reminiscent of my bike riding days growing up in New York City.

I've ignored most of the comments about the new Apple mapping app. And so far the app has mostly worked for me. But this morning as I walked from Porter Square to the Harvard Law School to pick up my Hubway bike, I wanted to check the distance for my walk.

So I entered Harvard Law School into the app and it was not found - so I was pointed at Harvard University. 

It is also not shown when you look at the map...

So I'm now entering the camp of those who are impatiently waiting for Apple to re-make the map app so that it is even at least as good as it used to be.

I've been commuting on the train for a while now and have been using two programs on my iPad for drawing and sketching. Each has their advantages and disadvantages. SketchbookPro is extremely full-featured and lets you save in Photoshop format with layers for later tweaking. Paper provides the most fluid drawing experience I have ever experienced. Paper also provide a standard "brush" that makes every stroke you draw just feel artistic.

Anyway, here's a recent sketch of a young woman on the Greenline -- this one is called Orange Girl on the GreenLine. I really like her sneakers. 

You can see more of my sketches here

Comments are welcome and ideas for other drawing programs and devices are always appreciated.